A method and apparatus for optimizing testing of a web based article to deflect communication away from a company's service call center is disclosed.
A knowledge base of articles is created by companies to support their products and services. These articles contain information about the company and its products and services to answer end user's questions. Companies typically make their knowledge base of articles available to an end user as well as customer service personnel in their call centers electronically using networks including intranets and their web site.
When an end user has a question regarding the company's product or service, the user may consult the companies manual provided with a product, may obtain information from a company's web site or may contact the company directly via e-mail, chat messaging or using telephone communication.
To handle this communication, the company must maintain a support staff. If the company is supporting a large base of end users, the support staff can become large and expensive. Further, the more communication the support staff handles, the more expensive it is for the company to support the product or service resulting in less company profits.
One way to reduce the support communication is to have quality product/service support articles posted on the company's web site. The ongoing goal of these articles is to lower support costs by deflecting calls by answering the end user's questions via a web page. The company can improve the deflection rate, by both adding new content and optimizing the existing content on the site. Optimizing content is a challenging process because the methods to identify opportunities and measure success are often manual, subjective, and time consuming. Companies look to knowledge base experts and other administrators to manually review and modify the articles based on their best practice experiences, analytical and reporting information as well as call center statistics.
A drawback of the current method of developing web based support articles is that because the process can be subjective, the best practice experiences are often hit or miss resulting in a potential increase in costs to companies in supporting their product or services. Another drawback is that inferior support articles can cause a time consuming and terrible end user experience by either requiring the end user to view multiple web pages and to sort through multiple articles or to give up in frustration. This bad end user experience may frustrate the end user and result in the end user no longer using the company's product or services or encourage them to call the call center and complain which ties up even more company resources.